I am very glad to hear of the pleasant event that has taken place in your family; and much obliged by your kindness in notifying
it to me. I hope the little fellow will grow up to be a credit to his kindred and country,—and perhaps be heard of to his
advantage, in England and the East, as his ancestors have been!1—

The East is not at all a pleasant place at present, since you left it; I have often thought how fatally soon your worst prognostications
of it, that evening, have verified themselves!2 I cannot bear to read those inhuman details in the Newspapers, nor do I love in the least the spirit in whh the English People mainly have taken it up. To punish the Sepoys, and mince them all to pieces &c &c:3 it were far better if the English People thought of punishing themselves for the very great folly they have manifested there,—and
indeed I grieve to think, in nearly all departments of their affairs lately,—whereby such results have become possible, had
become inevitable. People only weary me assigning “Causes”;—I seek, at present, no farther than the uppermost cause: An Army commanded for 50 years by imaginary Captains;—probably the most conspicuously portentous Entity the Sun can
look down upon; and capable of fermenting into results of any required degree of hideousness, against a given (tho' unknown)
day. The English Army generally, in India and elsewhere, has to me in these late years (whilst I have been reading about real
Armies) been a subject of endless wonder, deep and far from joyful. England thinks herself the “wisest nation of the world”
quite as a settled truism, not worth asserting: England will, before long, become less conspicuously the most blockhead Nation
in the world, or India will not be the last ill news she hears! In fact, I am grieved and miserable about these things;—and
have no resource but to banish them wholly out of my head, and to think of my own work while I have any.

My Wife came home, Wedy last, from a Two-months in Scotland, undertaken for health's sake,—evidently not without some profit that way. I have been
grinding along here, and shall be, without interval, for a period alarming to think of.— Do not neglect us when you come to
Town again.

1. Their son, John, b. 5 Sept., also became an administrator in India.

2. George Strachey recalled: “In the spring of 1857 … my brother … was spending an evening with the Carlyles, when there was much conversation about India. Although, at this
time, no one foresaw the particular catastrophe which was near the horizon, there were certain mutterings of an approaching
storm, and my brother had expressed in emphatic language his conviction of the utter rottenness of the native army” (Strachey,
“Reminiscences” 24).

3. Probably referring to reports throughout Sept. of the brutal practice of executing convicted rebels and mutineers by strapping them to the muzzle of a gun or cannon and
firing. Illustrated London News,3 Oct., reported an army parade, 10 June, at which there were 12 hangings and 45 such executions.